THE COLORIST

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09 May, 2008

Project Labels, a How To

Serial posts about a given topic are "Projects". I have found that labeling these popular posts with their own banner has been a fun and effective tool. An example of a banner and project is my Five for Friday tips at the Pastel blog.

Here's how to make them in Photoshop. Open a new project and title it appropriately. The size may be any size, as you will crop around your words later. The truly efficient here will want to establish a common size, but I don't.

Select the writing tool, which is labeled as "Horizontal Type Tool" in my version and configuration. I begin by typing the label, "Wolf Kahn Project", and then I open the font, size and style tools and see which font appeals to me. Select a color while you're at it.

Now the crop tool to center and size your finished product. Save your gem using "save as", and make it a Jpeg file. I like to get it in a file of the same name where I can also organize the pictures and sometimes text for the posts that I'll write under this banner.

A truly savvy computer user would tell you here how to make this banner clickable, so that it will provide a link to all of your posts with this label. Hello. This is me your talking to. I have no idea how to do that. There is a way in Blogger to "make hot" a Jpeg in the marginal column, as I have done for my labels "My Artworks," "My Abstracts," etc. But, you may wish to do the same in your posts.

I will do some research and see if I can learn how to write the code for making these Jpegs linkable. Or, some tech. reader will probably write it as a comment here. Enjoy your post labels!